African-American studies scholar Mark Anthony Neal has suggested that Beatty's protagonist, Gunnar Kaufman, is "a reference to the Swedish ethnographer Gunnar Myrdal, who chronicled black life in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy.[3]
Beatty’s protagonist Gunnar Kaufman embodies the progression that Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned with the Civil Rights Movement. He is an African-American male who was raised in predominantly Caucasian environment without profound discrimination. Although the white community accepts him, he struggles to be accepting of his native African-American community. Even after his mother moves his family to Hillside, a notorious California ghetto, he initially does not connect to the "ghetto" lifestyle. He has notions of what life as an African-American should be like, but he has yet to live it. Gunnar is a chameleon that slowly but surely fits into almost every environment he is placed in. When Gunnar moves from the predominant white Hillside to a predominantly Black neighborhood he slowly changes "colors" and begins to represent everything that is considered to be "Black." However, it could just be Gunnar's environment that is shaping his personality and not his desire to conform. Gunnar did desire to be accepted in this new community but even if he did not desire to be accepted he was bound to retain some of the attributes of the people that were in his surroundings. Gunnar's friendship with these Black characters can be interpreted as the white person saying these are my "cool Black friends". Gunnar is no longer the "cool Black" friend he is the "white person" saying these are my "cool Black friends".[1] Through the help of Scoby and Psycho Loco, he begins to fit into the black aesthetic, but superficial conforming does not change his innate personality. When his father forces him to return to a predominantly white school, he naturally reverts to his true self, one that does not see skin color as a barrier.
Beatty, writing Post-Civil Rights Movement and during the Black Arts Movement, creates a character that transcends racial barriers, as many African Americans at that time wished to do. He along with other activists redefined what it meant to be black. Beatty created a character that fit into a white community as equally well as a black community; he also marries and impregnates a Japanese woman. From Gunnar's encounter with the Harvard graduate, he learns that he is not interested in losing his true African-American self to become a pretentious imposter. The African-American community appoints him to the status of Negro Demagogue. They overlook the Caucasian environment that saturates the majority of his upbringing and his Japanese wife because at the end of the day, Gunnar is simply an African American male. This book proves that being raised in a ghetto or only having African-American friends are not the only qualification that one must fill to be considered "Black". Anyone can represent the African-American community, including well-spoken, well-educated black men and women. Paul Beatty's novel puts the foot in the door for a new Black being. It is a New Black Aesthetic.
Black exceptionality
The theme of black exceptionality is explored in the characters of Gunnar and Scoby. Both Gunnar and Scoby represent "the talented tenth", in that they escape Hillside and go on to higher education and promising futures. However, their successes are perceived differently by the white community. Scoby, the perfect Basketball player who is incapable of missing a basketball shot, is vilified and perceived as the pagan African demon with mystical powers. In contrast, Gunnar, a great player but not as good as Scoby, becomes "white society’s mercenary". He is accepted, tolerated, and claimed by whiteness, because of his lack of apparent blackness. Because Gunnar has never fulfilled the stereotypical "black" role, whites view him as less of a deviance from the hegemonic ideals. This is a larger commentary on where Blacks are allowed to be in the social hierarchy, and the limitations placed on their successes. Gunnar comments of the white community's treatment of Scoby saying "they would be a lot better off if they simply called Scoby a god and left it at that, it's no way they’ll proclaim a skinny black man God."
This theme is also explored with regard to Gunnar's participation in both basketball and poetry. While Gunnar exceeds at both hobbies, he is especially invested in poetry. For him, playing basketball is not as inherently interesting as it is simply an activity that makes him popular, but poetry intrigued him before he really knew how to write it. In the book, Gunnar narrates, "It occurred to me that maybe poems are like colds. Maybe I would feel a poem coming on. My chest would grow heavier, my eyes watery; my body temperature would fluctuate, and a ringing in my ears would herald the coming of a timeless verse (79)." Through Gunnar's shifting interests, Beatty comments on the intersection between exceptionality and passion. While Gunnar is expected to be good at basketball to be a "real" black male, the satisfaction it brings him is only superficial and dependent on the gaze of others. Poetry, on the other hand, is a skill that Gunnar builds on his own. He eventually becomes so famous for his magnum opus, Watermelanin, that he unintentionally becomes a "Leader of the Black Community" (1). As a result, Gunnar's blackness is ironically validated and treated as exceptional on a large scale through his "nerdy" pursuit of poetry instead of through basketball, like he had originally imagined.
Latinidad
Based out of Los Angeles, Gunnar's stay in Hillside happens in the context of a predominantly Black but also Latino population. We are first introduced to the Latinos in Gunnar's proximity when he walks the halls of his new school and notices the change over time of the school's demographics. By the 1960s, in the context of the Civil Rights Movements and other subsequent community movements for self-determination, "The faces of these graduating ninth-graders are dark and overwhelmingly Latino and black."[4] Gunnar walks down the hall and sees writing in Spanish—"Kathleen y Flaco para siempre con alma" sketched on the wall. (62) Later, his schools hosts the "Young Black and Latino Men: Endangered Species' assembly."[5] Notably, the text also makes various references to Latino and Chicano communities in the LA area.
Beatty is both playful and intentional about how he represents or pokes fun at Latinidad. For instance, he discusses the "San Borrachos Mountains" (Holy Drunk Mts) that do not officially exist. Later, in his Spanish class, he puts Mexican Octavio Paz and California Chicano Frost in the same sentence, saying: "Yo voy a escribir poemas como Octavio Paz y Kid Frost… Octavio Paz ere un poeta gordiflon y activista de Mexico… [Kid Frost] es un poetastro hip-hop de la viaja guardia, de la vieja escuela quien vivio en Pomona… de la old school."[6] To continue the literary allusions, Gunnar goes on to shut down the fetishization of Latino America—"Gunnar wrote 'Machisma Hermeneutics – Hemingway and the Hacienda Gringolust, An Obsession with the Latino Male'."[7] Similarly, Gunnar references the Farm Workers Movement and the Chicano Movement through the character of Manny—"Manny was a tall curly-haired Chicano whose mission in life was to improve the posture of every hunchbacked laborer, swaybacked [sex worker], and stoop-shouldered hoodlum in the neighborhood."[7] We even get introduced to Psycho Loco's (Cuban) Old Abuela Gloria.[8] Finally, Beatty remains true to Chicano slang from the time period with words such as "pocho", "firme", and "cuete".
